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As a kid at school a Welsh music teacher
told me that a good story was like a fish, with a distinct head, middle and
tail.At the time I thought it was clear
that he had never seen an eel, but in a rare moment of student restraint I said
nothing.Like many other teachers of
his generation, he mistook his ability to declaim without challenge for an
access to the truth.And for all that the prophets of Post-Modernism
would have fainted at such a simple notion of narrative, the vision of that
idea has stuck with me.

The idea of the story as a fish is too
simple to apply widely, but if ever there was a single place that held the
head, body and tail of my story it is the Lake District – The Lakes – in the
north western corner of England, just below Scotland. But even then it’s not that simple.Some of my stories came to an end in the
Lakes, some began and some found the full expression of the middle.

I first arrived in The Lakes to participate
in a Leadership Course – the full spectrum of butcher’s paper brainstorm
sessions, introspection and outdoor activity. During those two weeks the Wall
in Berlin fell, but no one felt the need to tell us.It was that kind of time: focused on an
inward path that would lead to an outward expression.The
course was supposed to send me back to my community empowered as a leader of
some sort, but what it did do was convince me I had to leave it.(A fish tail if ever there was one).

I returned to The Lakes ready to wash
dishes and clean carpets for a couple of months before starting to work as a
Volunteer Instructor.I expected to be
there for six months.I left four years
later.When I arrived I had all my
worldly goods in a couple of bags and one box.I left with a clutch of qualifications that surprised me as much as they
would have surprised my generally critical PE teachers.I also left in the company of the person who
is now my wife.To this day I still
don’t really know how I managed to do either.

I walked, climbed, scrambled and even
paddled a little.I met kids from all
over the UK and showed them some of the landscape that had inspired poet,
artist and tourist brochures; some of them may have even looked at what I was
talking about or listened to what I was saying. Some.

Now it was time to show my own kids.

We arrived in the Lakes on a road that runs
under the slopes of Blencathra, a many-headed hill that sits on the northern
edge of the Lakes.The small roads and
lanes that run away from the main roads are lined with brambles and old stone walls.On one afternoon, many years ago, we
collected blackberries and stashed them in our lunch boxes – later they were
converted into a crumble that has gained near mythic flavour.

Just visible was Sharp Edge, an angular
ridge that runs upward towards the rounded top of the hill.In both summer and winter it’s a good way to
gain height, but today we are looking elsewhere.

The story of the great blackberry
collection walk has been told before, but once more I find myself telling the
story, this time to the kids in the back of the car.It’s a story that has so many strands, food
and company not the least.It’s a story
that because of its very essence is about home and place – the provision of
food, the finding of comfort.It’s a
story that, like the blackberries, is rooted into a single place and makes no
sense elsewhere.But the meaning it
brings is independent of the landscape that made it.If, through a slip of fate, the story is lost
and forgotten, the landscape will remain the same, unchanged by the passing of
a story which it helped shape.We add
meaning to landscape, but the landscape remains unchanged.This is not just some modern, worship of the
individual situation, but an age-old issue.

Not that long ago fells like Blencathra and
rocky ridges like Sharp Edge would have been seen as bleak and inhospitable and
the prospect of walking on them for recreation, strange.But our view of the world has changed, and
once where there was emptiness and chill we now find the tonic of wildness and
isolation.But the bones of the
landscape have not changed.

Below the hump-backed fells lies an even
older example of our need to bring understanding into the landscape.Over 5000 years ago people discovered
something in the landscape here that they found valuable, and within sight of
some of the highest peaks in the Lakes they built what is now called Castlerigg
Stone Circle.We don’t know what its
purpose was, but it is beyond coincidence that a work of such effort would be
placed without thought or care.People
from that distant age were not brute savages with perpetually grazed knuckles,
but modern humans just like us.We spend
hours discussing the placement of glasses on tables and statues in gardens; why
would the builders of Castlerigg been any less careful?

There is a freedom to be had in a visit to
Castlerigg.The rituals and ceremonies
that occurred there have been lost, but it was clearly a place to visit; a
place where people – or their leaders at least – came together.And today you can stand within, next to and
even on the stones dependant on mood and your respect for regulation.This is not like Stonehenge where you can
only stand outside to look in and take it on faith – possibly an appropriate
reaction at such sites – that the stones have not be stolen away in the night
and replaced by concrete and fibreglass replicas.

The stones at Castlerigg do not sing at
dawn.You cannot strike your fist on the
hard slate surfaces to summon a wizard back from his battles with the
dragon.The Druidic rituals of pop
culture are an invention of a romantic age far more modern than the stones
themselves.But for all that, the stones
have a simple and magnificent presence.When you lay a hand upon them it’s the closest you can get to time
travel.You cannot help but think ‘why?’
The organisation and effort needed to drag these stones into this
formation would defeat most well fed modern communities, but 5000 years ago
people thought it was worthwhile.

People eat their lunch, backs rested on the
cool stone.A man and woman, with
separate paint boxes but shared water, paint watercolour landscapes.I can smell coffee being poured from a
flask.People are still drawn to the
flat field and its stones in the shadows of the high fells.

Effort. Meaning.Landscape. Place and space.Fish heads, fish tails and fish middles are
rolled into one and blended into stories that people will take away and
spread.The stones stand still, but the
meaning they help people make spreads like ripples on a pond.

Back in the lane where we left the car an
ice-cream van has parked, and people fret over the cost of a 99 and suggest
that the flakes are not the best quality.A meadow-brown butterfly works its unsteady way along the hedgerow.Somewhere in the distance a cuckoo calls a
few times and then falls silent.There
are many things more precious than ice-cream, but not everybody seems to
notice.

We head south down one of the valleys that
radiate out from the central core of the lakes.Think of pinching a ball of putty with the fingers, so that a cone forms
in the enclosed scape between the digits.The shape the putty takes will be a model of the Lakes – a central high
area, with valleys spread around the edge.First carved by rivers and then enlarged by glaciers, there are almost
as many long valleys in the Lakes as there are numbers on a clock.And each valley holds one or more bodies of
water.I use the term ‘bodies of water’
because only one of them is called a lake – the rest are meres, waters and
tarns.This is like a private joke that
The Lakes only contains one lake.

Memory is such a strange thing; even though
I never lived in the Northern Lakes they seemed so familiar.Road signs and junctions appeared just as
expected, single trees by the side of the road, which I had never photographed,
but always noticed, were still there.The place was strangely unchanged in many ways.After the expanse of Australian roads I had
expected the Lakeland ones to push in at the edges, especially where they were
flanked by snaggle-toothed drystone walls.This proved not to be the case.I
still caught up with (other) tourists who, intimidated by the imminent demise
of their cars’ paintwork, decide to drive along the middle of the road, rather
than keeping to the left.My old
frustration with caravans resurfaced.

If my memory of the Northern Lakes was
remarkable for its clarity, my memory of the ground closer to the place I
called home was notable for its ambiguity.I could not identify the corner in Hawkshead where Battersby’s Garage
used to be and I had swapped the locations of two of the village pubs.The clash between the certainty of my memory
and the evidence of my own eyes was off-putting.If the Kings Arms and the Queens Head can
merge in memory to become one misplaced entity, what other of my memories were
false or constructed?

The south Lakes are almost the picture
perfect English countryside; woods, small hidden ponds with rushy edges and the
look of fish, wooden way-marked paths that criss-cross the fields.In the distance you can see higher hills,
maybe mountains in the imagination, and certainly so in the winter.You can choose your own adventure.You are never that far from a pub or a café,
which you can use as a goal in themselves, or as a reward at the end of a
longer day.For the best part of five
years I called this part of the world home, and even now, twenty years later,
it would be an unusual week for me not to think of it.

We collected the keys to our rented house and
drove away from Hawkshead.Once we were
back on the narrow roads my memory recovered – the kink in the road where the
last house on the way north pushes out into the road, the old Courthouse by the
bridge where we turned left up the hill.If we drove too far we would start to drop down towards Coniston, with
its history and speeding ghosts.However, we had detailed directions, which ended with ‘and then turn
right down the rough track marked by the blue wheelie bin and the triangular
back of a road sign’.What this lacked
in formality it made up for in accuracy.

Passing through two gates, both held in
place by improvised latches of string and wire, we arrived at the house.Built from rough-cut slate blocks the house
was in fact an old water mill.Build in
a formidable L shape the heel of the house was set deep into the ground, so
that all you could see from the track was the roof and the upper floor
room.In its entirety the mill stepped
down through six floors, all but one of which was a single room.A staircase, creaking wood in its upper
sections and foot chilling stone in its lower, spiralled down through the
building.It smelt of the woodland that
surrounded it.With the windows open, it
rang to the sound of the stream that flowed past the toe of the L, over a long
unmoving water wheel.Bird feeders hung
outside the windows and I could hear Wood Pigeons in the trees.In the kitchen the water ran fridge cold from
the tap, and the cistern in the toilet filled at an unmodern and leisurely
rate.Although it was summer, the grate
was still full of recent ashes from a coal fire.If a small black cat, with an under-chin
white spot, had walked into one of the rooms I would have not been surprised as
this building was hauntingly similar to the house I was born and brought up in.But just to prove that progress was possible this
one had running hot water and a working stove. The longer I stayed there the
greater the sense of familiarity became; the uneven stone floor under foot, the
way the lock on the back door clicked twice as you unlocked it.The cat never appeared, but behind the mill
we found evidence of other black and white residents.

The flat stone bridge over the stream had
one section that rocked with a hollow tic-toc that marked your passing.Oak trees shaded a vague path and hazels,
already robbed of nuts, hung their soft round leaves at head height. The path
skirted a small, steep sided valley so that the ground dropped away steeply on
the right and rose up to a fence line on the left.This was classically English habitat; damp,
green, soft, small.And pouring down
from the fence line, in fan shaped sweeps, was the evidence that we shared
these woodlands with badgers.

There were half a dozen fans of excavated
soil below the fence line, and moving away from them in many directions were
paths of flattened plants.The bottom
wires of the fence line held clumps of stiff hair, and one of the flattened
paths carried on out into the uncut summer meadow beyond.

I liberated a few handfuls of peanuts from
the bird feeders and scattered them near the entrances to the sett.Peanuts are essentially Badger crack – a combination
of tastes and textures that they find irresistible.We left the peanuts to do their addictive
best.The next morning they were gone;
not a single one remained in sight.The
piles were replenished in anticipation of the coming evening.

At just past dusk we walked out over the
flat-slab stone bridge that spanned the stream behind the mill.The noise of the water, increased by overnight
rain, covered the tic-toc of the wobbling slab. The sett itself was just over a
slight rise, maybe some form of mill archaeology long buried in leaf
litter.Whatever its origin the rise and
the voice of the river allowed us to walk to within a few meters of the setts
unseen and unheard.I had briefed the
kids on the need for silence – a fool’s errand if ever there was one – and to
my surprise it seemed to be working.We
moved forward a feather step at a time until we could see into the mouth of the
nearest hole.And there was our target,
in one of the entrances to the sett hidden below a hazel thicket – just a black
and white shape really – busily hoovering up my offering of peanuts.It was hard not to laugh; you could hear all
kinds of munching and slorphing noises emerging from the gloom.

This was more a proof of concept sighting
than real badger watching, but it set us up for the nights that followed.There was something undoubtedly magical
about having badgers just over the stream.Of course our presence made little different to the badgers (peanuts
excepted), who, from the size of the sett, had probably been there for many
years.But it made this a special place
for me; a place that was so rooted in classic Englishness that it bordered on
caricature but for all that it was real.I took a small piece of woodland and let it become all the things I
missed in my new home.It became a
distillation of the things I thought I would do, before my journey took an
unexpected turn and I headed south.

Of course it was none of the things I made
it.It was just a small patch of
Cumbria, as distinct and different as it was homely and reassuring.But for one week, for me, it became so much
more.

A few evenings later we were all sat around
the base of an oak tree in the gathering darkness of the evening.The midges, tiny biting flies which are
surely the product of the dark side of evolution, were mercifully scarce and
the mosquitoes largely absent.We could
hear a badger eating its fix of peanuts, but all we could see was a lumpy form
in the deep shadow of the sett entrance.The badger, presumably having finished its peanut starter dish, emerged
from the shadows and trotted stiff legged up the slope, away from us and
towards the fence line.I assumed it
would disappear into the meadow beyond, but the crashing and rustling up by the
fence suggested otherwise.At this point
it became clear that badgers do not have a stealth mode.The badger was uphill from us and this meant
that every so often a face would appear silhouetted against the relative
lightness of the sky.A triangular face
with rounded teddy bear ears would look down the slope in our direction.I’m sure that the badger knew we were there,
somewhere, but it was unable to determine where.It turned its head so that its long snout
pointed off to the left – a perfect silhouette of the long angular face.You could just make out the pale markings.There was more crashing from above us and I
am convinced that there was more than one animal up there – maybe young ones,
clumsy at the world’s novelty. The
woodland falls quiet, save for the whispered reports of bats from my children.

The rocky stone bridge welcomes us back
home.A Tawny Owl kricks from somewhere
further down the valley.The back door
clicks shut. I pour a beer.Out in the
woodlands the badgers go about their night-time chores.

Early morning sunlight filters through the
trees that shade the mill.Motes of
dust.Light beams.The cool of a summer morning moves through
the open window and promises clear skies and light winds.I listen to the woodland awake as my family
lies asleep.

Behind the village of Coniston a steep road
runs up and away from the valley floor with its stone edged fields and solid
slate built houses.It’s a road to
traumatise drivers used to freeways and city slopes.The very top of the steepest part is marked
by a sharp left hand corner, followed by a right.The very end of the road is marked by a gate
– The Fell Gate – that separates the enclosed lowlands fields from the open
fell beyond.The Gate and the wall it
passes through are a clear boundary between two different, but linked worlds.But it is also a meeting place where things
long disconnected come together and reconnect.Uplands and lowlands.Summer
pasture and winter shelter.And it is a
place where you can arrange to meet friends with the certainty that everybody
knows the place you mean.

There is a car park of sorts beyond the gates,
which slowly starts to fill. Most of the cars are driven by people I have not
seen for years, and the back seats are filled with children I have never
met.Twenty years have passed since we
all worked for the YMCA (please don’t sing the song) on the shores of
Windermere. Five years, ten years, even twenty years have passed since I last
saw some of these people but the smiles of recognition are ready and real.We all used to take other peoples’ children
into the mountains, and now we have met to do the same thing with children of
our own. So many meetings and collisions, so many separations and reunions; so
many story lines that intersected in the past briefly reconnected, at the
Coniston Fell Gate

With the exception of a few of the kids we
had all done this walk before, in winter, in summer, rain and sunshine, in
company and on our own; sometimes carrying ropes accompanied by the tambourine
rattle of climbing gear, sometimes carrying little more than a flask of coffee
and pack of Eccles Cakes (Made with Real Butter).

On this day some people brought children
and some brought dogs, some brought both.Some brought cameras and walking poles. Everybody brought chocolate. Everybody brought
memories.

The walk was probably incidental, just an
excuse for slow moving conversations and selective catching up – nobody needs
to hear the bad stuff.We walk along the
Walna Scar Road, once a thoroughfare between valleys, but now more trod for
pleasure than commerce. I pass the spot where I first met Nick, who in later
years would come to Australia to be at my wedding; the start of a story to say
the least.

We turn right, uphill, towards Goats Water
and Dow Crag where we stop for the ritual of morning tea.Rock chairs or beds are chosen as suits the
individual.Beyond the water the path
rises steeply and I stop to take pictures and catch my breath.At the summit – The Old Man of Coniston – the
jokes are predictable and well known.The land falls away in all directions.Memories rise from all directions.The walk back to the car is too short for all the conversations that
come to mind.

The Old Man was the first hill in The Lakes
I know I climbed.For a while it will
also be the last.